help with a sentence

[Satish]

Can someone tell me how to interpret this sentence:

Minä kauhoin vedessä kissaa.

It is from a children´s book about a cat, who has just been thrown into a swimming pool. The book is from the perspective of the cat, so minä refers to the cat.

kauhoin is a form of kauhoa = to ladle or to scoop

kissa in the partitive has me stumped.

Does the sentence literally mean I scooped cat in the water?
It must be a figure of speech....

[Pursuivant]

Äh, you must know another figure of speech to get this - when kids learn to swim, they "swim dog". So naturally a cat won't swim dog, hence "swims cat".

[EP]

And "uida" means "to swim"."Kauhoa" is just a more descriptive way to say it: The movement you make with your hands and arms, or in this case paws.

[EP]

"Swim dog" = move your arms the way a dog does when it swims.

"Swim cat" = move your arms the way a cat does when it swims.

In reality "swim dog" is what a person who does not really know how to swim does instinctively if thrown into water. "Swim cat" – very difficult to stay on the surface.

[Satish]

Thanks EP and Pursuivant and LOL!!!

Now I truly know that I am a monk in the monastery of lost causes, Finnish learning section..

This thread reminds of that old UNIX command "more" which was used to view text on screen. Then came the expanded version of the command, which obviously could not be called "morer" or "moremore" so it was very logically called "less"....

Hmm.. given this is the country of Linux, cat swimming cat, human swimming dog all starts to make sense..

[EP]

And breaststroke is rintauinti but in reality it is "swim frog".

[Rob A.]

And breaststroke is rintauinti but in reality it is "swim frog".

....and, accroding to wikipedia the "butterfly stroke" is called, perhosuinti...

[Pursuivant]

but then there is "krooli" , but you do it usually in a pool filled with "kloori"...
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uinti